Hello
I am RoboChaos and I have been playing this game for almost 2 years. I am level 70 and have done pretty much everything there is to do in the game (except post to this forum!). I have quit the game a few times but always came back to it.
I am again in the process of quitting in the game and I think this time it will be for real, so I think I would like to make a last contribution as a farewell.
To put some context to my suggestions, I am very much what's called a Casual Player. I often play stretches of 15 to 30 minutes when I can (usually before sleeping), and I make regular use of the auto-battle in situations like Breakfast and Lunch. I absolutely love the Skullgirls franchise and fighting games in general. I don't like gacha.
There is a tl;dr with condensed suggestions at the end of the post, so scroll down all the way if you want.
Rift
First of all, the Rift rework indeed addressed many of the problems old Rift had, but I still think there's more to do. The Rift is supposed to be the end game content, but players are not able to focus entirely on Rift, because it doesn't give Experience, Coins, Theonite, moves and other things you can get from other modes. If you want more players, you have to make it more attractive and self-sustainable as the mode of play.
A point which I think is a real downgrade of the new Rift experience is the fact that everybody now gets reset to 1000 points. It basically means all the grinding I do in one week is wasted for the others. As a casual player, I don't have the time to grind a lot in any given week, and I was hoping I would be able to keep playing this game by very slowly climbing my way up the rift like it was kinda possible before (except playing 5 matches per week has super annoying). Now I'm sure I will never be able to reach Diamond, and this is pretty much the reason I'm considering quitting forever, there's nothing else to look forward to. I absolutely understand the need to set players back every season in order to level things a bit, but resetting everybody back to 1000 is just depressing since it throws all your previous effort to the thrash. It rewards grinders at the detriment of casual players.
Also, I had zero fun squishing low-level players while trying to build up my score from 1000 this week. I suspect they got very sad once they saw they had zero chance to take back their points once they saw every single one of my characters has around 20k FS. I don't want to do this mindless noob crushing every single week.
My specific suggestion would be that you reset people on tiers: every Rookie gets reset to 1000, every Bronze gets reset back to the score of the worst bronze form last season and so on until Diamond. Or just separate them by 100 (Rookie at 1000, Bronze at 1100, etc.). And maybe have a hard limit on 2000 or 1500 being the maximum reset number to prevent inflation? This would give players the feeling that they are really part of a Tier (Rookie/Bronze/Silver/etc) and that they have a week to focus into moving up to the next tier, instead of having all their previous efforts thrown into the trash every week.
Moves
As an end-game player, I find it ridiculous that I have only very few moves with ideal stats (e.g., atk% + piercing + meter, or def + hp% + meter, and other good combinations). The percent change of getting these is way too small. I don't have even a SINGLE character that I feel has 6 moves worth of upgrading to level 15. I feel you guys have overgacha'd moves to a horrible extreme.
I also get the feeling that some characters or moves have "affinities" for certain bonuses. For example, most of my Double moves tend to have Elemental Advantage as one of its stats, while Painwheel and Ms. Fortune moves love some atk% and Squigly moves love to roll def%. It may be just coincidence, but this seems to create unnecessary unbalance to the roster.
My suggestion would be that you guys make it somehow easier to obtain moves with ideal stats. I would get entirely rid of the atk+ and def+ (not %) stats in order to reduce the total pool by 2, and replace them in current moves with random stuff. Also, if the stat affinity for characters (or specific specials/bbs) is indeed a thing, please get rid of it. I really don't want more Double moves with Element Advantage %, that's not how I play her, that's not how I have fun.
Also, even though you have made a lot of progress already (sort by Recent was great!), the collection is still a mess to manage, because you have to keep tapping every move to see the stats. I would love to have some kind of view that shows me a table indicating which stat is given by each move without requiring taps so I can more easily sort and mass sell them. I know the mobile screen real state is a huge constraint here. Am I dreaming too much in hoping that you would publish some website (your main URL slash manage-your-collection) where I can login with my game credentials and then manage my collection in a huge web page with a giant table with sortable columns and some convenient Javascript? Heck, I would take even a Libreoffice Calc spreadsheet with some macros that connect to the game
.
Stopping to sell moves is absolutely the worst experience I get in this game. I am currently at 925 moves because I absolutely hate stopping to pick moves to sell.
Diamond Keys
As a level 70 player, what sets back my progress are 3 basic resources: Canopy Coins, Experience and Diamond Keys. I know Dia Keys are supposed to be a rare resource, but at the current state I am pretty much forced to buy them for 1m Canopy and this is way too much IMHO. I have 5 natural diamonds sitting idle because I have no keys for them. I would love if you could increase the % of getting them from Accursed Experiments or perhaps give us a way to convert Keys into next tiers. I wouldn't mind having to give 250 gold keys for a single Diamond Key lol.
PS: thanks for the 2 free Diamond keys as part of today's Rift rewards
Cheating
This is another depressing aspect of a game that is essentially competitive. Cheaters inflate both the PF and Rift scores, and that really sucks a lot.
I never tried to dig into how the game is programmed, but from what I can see my guess is that the local game only reports the outcome of the fight to the server and that's it. Am I correct? Anyway, one thing you could try to do is to make the client submit a replay of the fight (which is just a list with inputs in each frame, RNG seeds and character stats + moves) at the end of each fight. You don't even need to make the server validate the replay before giving the player the rewards. Just store the replays in a database and occasionally make some external daemon try to validate these replays by playing them, and then ban the offenders (replays that end in loss or just make no sense). As a bonus you can use the replay system to do automated continuous integration of your commits.
I know that anti-cheating is an eternal arms race, that resources spent on it are resources not spent on making the other aspects of the game better, and that cheaters would then start cooking their own replays if you did this, but at least this would generate a lot of work for the hackers, and would outright prevent cases such as a 700 FS team beating a 64k FS team (since you pretty much can't win such fights due to the 3 minute timeout).
Training/damage
Skullgirls was famous for having a very good training mode compared to other games of its era, but SGM clearly does not inherit that. Please at least gives us an option to show the total damage of a combo, and a way to toggle infinite meter and zero cooldowns. Also having a way to know which moves are command grabs, which moves have armor, etc would really help. And Sonicfox.
Shop
As a level 70 player, there is absolutely nothing in the game shop that is worth buying for me. Nothing I can buy there would make a dent in my gaming experience. I don't want to spend a ton of money in a set of relics that are maybe going to give me a Gold character I already got in last week's PF. As a level 70, I would want to see stuff such as a pack of 10 diamond keys, maybe Diamond relics, good moves, 4.5M exp for a Golden character, etc. Probably the thing I want the most is the ability to buy a Furry Furry with 100% chance of success (because screw spending money on gacha stuff!). Everything else is negligible for me, since it has virtually no impact. I understand the current stuff in the shop makes a lot of difference for low level players, so maybe we could have some kind of "level 70 exclusive" shop?
I see the prices of stuff in Brazilian Reais (BRL) instead of US Dollars, and things in this game are waaay too costly. Minimum wage in Brazil is R$1045,00 per month. A pizza costs about R$30,00 in my town. The 7200 theonite offer costs R$369,99, that's more than 1/3 of monthly minimum wage. A brand new full-price PS4 game is generally R$250 (although most games are cheaper, just check the .br version of Amazon which I can't link due to the sneaky URL filter). R$369 is way too much money for a dice roll that is likely to result in nothing of value.
I am fortunate enough to have a stable income and a deep desire to support the Skullgirls franchise, so I did some purchases in order to help the devs. The last one was 5M Canopy Coins in a special sale. But seriously, if you had saner less-gacha-y shop I would have spent so much more money on it...
Prize Fights
PFs are one of the main modes of this game, yet it feels somewhat outdated and abandoned. Two years without changes I can remember. Point inflation of the Gold PF has created a situation where you need a really good collection to get that 10% reward, and that is very discouraging to such players. I bet you have a bunch of players that reach that point where they are done with story mode but still don't have a good enough collection to get that 10%, so they just give up and abandon the game. On top of that, cheaters help inflate the scores even more.
A first obvious solution would be to move that 10% threshold into a 20% threshold. Easy to implement and can be online in a week from now if you want. Just to alleviate the pressure.
As for real solutions, one would be to introduce a Diamond tier to PFs. Give a random Gold or just a few diamond shards as a reward, and leave the Gold PF to the players that are not so advanced so they don't give up and quit like I did once.
Another thing about PFs is that your defense teams serve no purpose. The amount of points you get from defending is way too little to make any difference, so players are not compelled to try to make good defense teams. I really think you guys should multiply the defense win reward by at least 10 in order to encourage people to be creative and make some good defensive teams. Because as of now, why bother?
As a last comment, please pretty please write the standings and thresholds of rewards in the in-game mail you send to players after the fights are over. Instead of telling me I was in "top 11%-30%" just tell me I was on the 16% percentile, and also tell me how many points I needed in order to achieve the next tier. Seriously, you already have your server calculate it and then a human writing this to your forums, just send it as part of the in-game mail. I am tired of replying to Reddit posts telling people to look at the official forums.
Gacha chances
Please publish the % chance of getting each reward from ads, from friend gifts and from opening shiny fighters. Seriously. You started this trend of not publishing the chances from the stuff you recently introduced to the game and that is absolutely not cool. Don't be evil.
Others
When I use Jawbreaker and use False Intentions, it does not count towards the Taunt Accolade.
Please fix the bug of getting stunned mid-air. I abused the hell out of it on Accursed Experiments with Valentine: she does a lot of extra air hits when stunned.
Command grabs are too OP. What the hell am I supposed to do against an AI with Wulf Shoot? Can't neutral jump. Can you please at least limit the range? This became a problem now that the AI uses special moves on neutral.
The AI Cerebella absolutely loves to whiff Diamonds Are Forever after she knocks me down. AI Valentine also loves to whiff her BB1s when out of range on knockdown. They always do these whiffs in the very same situations, it feels like their AIs were hardcoded to whiff blockbusters. Why?
Can you please increase the range of Peacock's launcher? Or reduce the pushback of her L4 (the projectile). Because if I start the combo at max reachable distance for the jab, the launcher whiffs. She is pretty much the only character that has this problem.
I would love to see some game representatives on Reddit.
When I previously quit
As an example of frustrating experience, let me list the times I quit this game already:
Closing thoughts
I hope this post did not sound as a big rant. I love the game and I am just trying to give some suggestions to make it even better. Everything I have not mentioned in this post is absolutely great!
Thank you very much for making this game. Skullgirls has provided hundreds if not thousands of hours of entertainment to me and I really wish to see the franchise move forward. I feel I am mostly done with this game after these years, but you may want to consider my suggestions if you want it to prosper more and more.
Ah, and make Sonicfox the next playable character, please.
tl;dr:
Thank you,
RoboChaos.
I am RoboChaos and I have been playing this game for almost 2 years. I am level 70 and have done pretty much everything there is to do in the game (except post to this forum!). I have quit the game a few times but always came back to it.
I am again in the process of quitting in the game and I think this time it will be for real, so I think I would like to make a last contribution as a farewell.
To put some context to my suggestions, I am very much what's called a Casual Player. I often play stretches of 15 to 30 minutes when I can (usually before sleeping), and I make regular use of the auto-battle in situations like Breakfast and Lunch. I absolutely love the Skullgirls franchise and fighting games in general. I don't like gacha.
There is a tl;dr with condensed suggestions at the end of the post, so scroll down all the way if you want.
Rift
First of all, the Rift rework indeed addressed many of the problems old Rift had, but I still think there's more to do. The Rift is supposed to be the end game content, but players are not able to focus entirely on Rift, because it doesn't give Experience, Coins, Theonite, moves and other things you can get from other modes. If you want more players, you have to make it more attractive and self-sustainable as the mode of play.
A point which I think is a real downgrade of the new Rift experience is the fact that everybody now gets reset to 1000 points. It basically means all the grinding I do in one week is wasted for the others. As a casual player, I don't have the time to grind a lot in any given week, and I was hoping I would be able to keep playing this game by very slowly climbing my way up the rift like it was kinda possible before (except playing 5 matches per week has super annoying). Now I'm sure I will never be able to reach Diamond, and this is pretty much the reason I'm considering quitting forever, there's nothing else to look forward to. I absolutely understand the need to set players back every season in order to level things a bit, but resetting everybody back to 1000 is just depressing since it throws all your previous effort to the thrash. It rewards grinders at the detriment of casual players.
Also, I had zero fun squishing low-level players while trying to build up my score from 1000 this week. I suspect they got very sad once they saw they had zero chance to take back their points once they saw every single one of my characters has around 20k FS. I don't want to do this mindless noob crushing every single week.
My specific suggestion would be that you reset people on tiers: every Rookie gets reset to 1000, every Bronze gets reset back to the score of the worst bronze form last season and so on until Diamond. Or just separate them by 100 (Rookie at 1000, Bronze at 1100, etc.). And maybe have a hard limit on 2000 or 1500 being the maximum reset number to prevent inflation? This would give players the feeling that they are really part of a Tier (Rookie/Bronze/Silver/etc) and that they have a week to focus into moving up to the next tier, instead of having all their previous efforts thrown into the trash every week.
Moves
As an end-game player, I find it ridiculous that I have only very few moves with ideal stats (e.g., atk% + piercing + meter, or def + hp% + meter, and other good combinations). The percent change of getting these is way too small. I don't have even a SINGLE character that I feel has 6 moves worth of upgrading to level 15. I feel you guys have overgacha'd moves to a horrible extreme.
I also get the feeling that some characters or moves have "affinities" for certain bonuses. For example, most of my Double moves tend to have Elemental Advantage as one of its stats, while Painwheel and Ms. Fortune moves love some atk% and Squigly moves love to roll def%. It may be just coincidence, but this seems to create unnecessary unbalance to the roster.
My suggestion would be that you guys make it somehow easier to obtain moves with ideal stats. I would get entirely rid of the atk+ and def+ (not %) stats in order to reduce the total pool by 2, and replace them in current moves with random stuff. Also, if the stat affinity for characters (or specific specials/bbs) is indeed a thing, please get rid of it. I really don't want more Double moves with Element Advantage %, that's not how I play her, that's not how I have fun.
Also, even though you have made a lot of progress already (sort by Recent was great!), the collection is still a mess to manage, because you have to keep tapping every move to see the stats. I would love to have some kind of view that shows me a table indicating which stat is given by each move without requiring taps so I can more easily sort and mass sell them. I know the mobile screen real state is a huge constraint here. Am I dreaming too much in hoping that you would publish some website (your main URL slash manage-your-collection) where I can login with my game credentials and then manage my collection in a huge web page with a giant table with sortable columns and some convenient Javascript? Heck, I would take even a Libreoffice Calc spreadsheet with some macros that connect to the game
.Stopping to sell moves is absolutely the worst experience I get in this game. I am currently at 925 moves because I absolutely hate stopping to pick moves to sell.
Diamond Keys
As a level 70 player, what sets back my progress are 3 basic resources: Canopy Coins, Experience and Diamond Keys. I know Dia Keys are supposed to be a rare resource, but at the current state I am pretty much forced to buy them for 1m Canopy and this is way too much IMHO. I have 5 natural diamonds sitting idle because I have no keys for them. I would love if you could increase the % of getting them from Accursed Experiments or perhaps give us a way to convert Keys into next tiers. I wouldn't mind having to give 250 gold keys for a single Diamond Key lol
.PS: thanks for the 2 free Diamond keys as part of today's Rift rewards
Cheating
This is another depressing aspect of a game that is essentially competitive. Cheaters inflate both the PF and Rift scores, and that really sucks a lot.
I never tried to dig into how the game is programmed, but from what I can see my guess is that the local game only reports the outcome of the fight to the server and that's it. Am I correct? Anyway, one thing you could try to do is to make the client submit a replay of the fight (which is just a list with inputs in each frame, RNG seeds and character stats + moves) at the end of each fight. You don't even need to make the server validate the replay before giving the player the rewards. Just store the replays in a database and occasionally make some external daemon try to validate these replays by playing them, and then ban the offenders (replays that end in loss or just make no sense). As a bonus you can use the replay system to do automated continuous integration of your commits
.I know that anti-cheating is an eternal arms race, that resources spent on it are resources not spent on making the other aspects of the game better, and that cheaters would then start cooking their own replays if you did this, but at least this would generate a lot of work for the hackers, and would outright prevent cases such as a 700 FS team beating a 64k FS team (since you pretty much can't win such fights due to the 3 minute timeout).
Training/damage
Skullgirls was famous for having a very good training mode compared to other games of its era, but SGM clearly does not inherit that. Please at least gives us an option to show the total damage of a combo, and a way to toggle infinite meter and zero cooldowns. Also having a way to know which moves are command grabs, which moves have armor, etc would really help. And Sonicfox.
Shop
As a level 70 player, there is absolutely nothing in the game shop that is worth buying for me. Nothing I can buy there would make a dent in my gaming experience. I don't want to spend a ton of money in a set of relics that are maybe going to give me a Gold character I already got in last week's PF. As a level 70, I would want to see stuff such as a pack of 10 diamond keys, maybe Diamond relics, good moves, 4.5M exp for a Golden character, etc. Probably the thing I want the most is the ability to buy a Furry Furry with 100% chance of success (because screw spending money on gacha stuff!). Everything else is negligible for me, since it has virtually no impact. I understand the current stuff in the shop makes a lot of difference for low level players, so maybe we could have some kind of "level 70 exclusive" shop?
I see the prices of stuff in Brazilian Reais (BRL) instead of US Dollars, and things in this game are waaay too costly. Minimum wage in Brazil is R$1045,00 per month. A pizza costs about R$30,00 in my town. The 7200 theonite offer costs R$369,99, that's more than 1/3 of monthly minimum wage. A brand new full-price PS4 game is generally R$250 (although most games are cheaper, just check the .br version of Amazon which I can't link due to the sneaky URL filter). R$369 is way too much money for a dice roll that is likely to result in nothing of value.
I am fortunate enough to have a stable income and a deep desire to support the Skullgirls franchise, so I did some purchases in order to help the devs. The last one was 5M Canopy Coins in a special sale. But seriously, if you had saner less-gacha-y shop I would have spent so much more money on it...
Prize Fights
PFs are one of the main modes of this game, yet it feels somewhat outdated and abandoned. Two years without changes I can remember. Point inflation of the Gold PF has created a situation where you need a really good collection to get that 10% reward, and that is very discouraging to such players. I bet you have a bunch of players that reach that point where they are done with story mode but still don't have a good enough collection to get that 10%, so they just give up and abandon the game. On top of that, cheaters help inflate the scores even more.
A first obvious solution would be to move that 10% threshold into a 20% threshold. Easy to implement and can be online in a week from now if you want. Just to alleviate the pressure.
As for real solutions, one would be to introduce a Diamond tier to PFs. Give a random Gold or just a few diamond shards as a reward, and leave the Gold PF to the players that are not so advanced so they don't give up and quit like I did once.
Another thing about PFs is that your defense teams serve no purpose. The amount of points you get from defending is way too little to make any difference, so players are not compelled to try to make good defense teams. I really think you guys should multiply the defense win reward by at least 10 in order to encourage people to be creative and make some good defensive teams. Because as of now, why bother?
As a last comment, please pretty please write the standings and thresholds of rewards in the in-game mail you send to players after the fights are over. Instead of telling me I was in "top 11%-30%" just tell me I was on the 16% percentile, and also tell me how many points I needed in order to achieve the next tier. Seriously, you already have your server calculate it and then a human writing this to your forums, just send it as part of the in-game mail. I am tired of replying to Reddit posts telling people to look at the official forums.
Gacha chances
Please publish the % chance of getting each reward from ads, from friend gifts and from opening shiny fighters. Seriously. You started this trend of not publishing the chances from the stuff you recently introduced to the game and that is absolutely not cool. Don't be evil.
Others
When I use Jawbreaker and use False Intentions, it does not count towards the Taunt Accolade.
Please fix the bug of getting stunned mid-air. I abused the hell out of it on Accursed Experiments with Valentine: she does a lot of extra air hits when stunned.
Command grabs are too OP. What the hell am I supposed to do against an AI with Wulf Shoot? Can't neutral jump. Can you please at least limit the range? This became a problem now that the AI uses special moves on neutral.
The AI Cerebella absolutely loves to whiff Diamonds Are Forever after she knocks me down. AI Valentine also loves to whiff her BB1s when out of range on knockdown. They always do these whiffs in the very same situations, it feels like their AIs were hardcoded to whiff blockbusters. Why?
Can you please increase the range of Peacock's launcher? Or reduce the pushback of her L4 (the projectile). Because if I start the combo at max reachable distance for the jab, the launcher whiffs. She is pretty much the only character that has this problem.
I would love to see some game representatives on Reddit.
When I previously quit
As an example of frustrating experience, let me list the times I quit this game already:
- When I finished Story Mode but was too weak to get top 10% in Gold PFs. That is a point of the game where there's kinda nothing exciting to do. Between your 2nd high-level gold and your ~6th. Then it gets better.
- When my 1st, 2nd and 4th Diamond characters were all Heavy Handed Cerebellas (I got a fourth copy some time later too). You doubled the amount of Diamonds in the game, which helped a little bit, but I still get duplicates (got a second Stand out recently!).
- After the Christmas PF where I made 100M points. Burned out.
- Now that I realize my plan of playing Rift only and slowly build my way to the Diamond rank is going to be impossible due to the weekly reset to 1000 points. I don't want to spend hours squishing noobs every week before I get to the fun part of challenging players at my level.
Closing thoughts
I hope this post did not sound as a big rant. I love the game and I am just trying to give some suggestions to make it even better. Everything I have not mentioned in this post is absolutely great!
Thank you very much for making this game. Skullgirls has provided hundreds if not thousands of hours of entertainment to me and I really wish to see the franchise move forward. I feel I am mostly done with this game after these years, but you may want to consider my suggestions if you want it to prosper more and more.
Ah, and make Sonicfox the next playable character, please.
tl;dr:
- Rift: make "playing only the Rift mode" more feasible by at least giving Experience and Canopy coins as part of its rewards.
- Rift: reset players score in tiers instead of putting everybody back to 1000. We need a feeling of weekly progress.
- Moves: make it easier to get moves with 3 good stats.
- Moves: get rid of absolute atk and hp values in moves (at least Gold ones).
- Moves: get rid of stat affinities for moves in case they indeed do exist.
- Moves: make the collection easier to manage.
- Keys: increase the chance of getting a Diamond key from Accursed Experiments.
- Keys: create a way to convert keys into higher tier keys (bronze -> silver -> gold -> diamond).
- Cheaters: keep the anti-cheat arms race by gathering replays of every match and banning matches with replays that don't win.
- Training: improve Training mode, giving us at least the total damage for combos and an infinite meter option.
- Training: Sonicfox.
- Shop: have a level-70 exclusive shop with stuff that is relevant.
- Shop: have prices that are feasible for non-US people.
- Shop: options for people who don't like gambling
- PFs: increase the threshold to 20% while we don' t have better solutions
- PFs: make a diamond category
- PFs: give WAY more points for defense wins.
- PFs: give information about point thresholds in the post-PF in-game mail.
- Transparency: publish the chances of prizes from friend gifts, ad viewing, shiny fighters and everything else.
- Bugs: please fix the bugs reported above.
- Others: Add a way for us to beat/avoid command grabs.
- Others: Make the AI stop whiffing BBs on oki.
- Others: Fix distancing on Peacock's ground combo so the launcher doesn't whiff.
- Next characters: Sonicfox
Thank you,
RoboChaos.
